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I am reduced to scribbling on spare pieces of parchment, because we've been betrayed.
The Annals are gone, stolen, held hostage.
It's my fault. I didn't do anything wrong, but I'm the Annalist, and the Annals are in danger, so it's my fault.
Uruk troops out of Barad-dur came for our Annals after we'd collapsed in our bunks in Minas Morgul. They slew Aya Bastard and Croc, who were on on duty guarding them. They died fighting; we found them in pieces surrounded by a nice, thick ring of dead uruks.
Panic-stricken and terrified in ways that no Gondorian sorcery can replicate, we tried to contact the Captain, but found they had abducted him too. They had taken our Old Man alive, but several nail-biting hours later they sent us his head, and a message.
The Lidless Eye, it seems, had not given us permission to leave the battlefield. We had been under orders to take Minas Tirith or die trying, and then we had ordered a full retreat. For this, it seems, we merited a Mordor-style purge.
The Captain had taken command and ordered the withdrawal, so the Captain must be culled like some surly warchief of Mordor. We value our heritage more than life itself, so our history and identity was to be held to ensure our loyalty. The war against Gondor wasn't done and the Dark Lord had need of our services, but only on his terms.
With the strike of a single sulfur stick, he can destroy us- erase almost a thousand years of Company history. What are we? Mere mercenaries? No, we are the Black Company, and we stand on the shoulders of giants. Our giants are threatened now. There is no move we can make, no stratagem we can adopt, no option to take but full obedience to the Eye.
But I remember, from the Annals; the story of Sleepy's guerrilla campaign against the Protector. I remember our defiance, our stubbornness, our absolute refusal to accept defeat. I remember that as long as we draw breath, our foes had best be wary. We hereby declare ourselves to be the Eye's most bitter enemy.
Water sleeps, O Lord of Barad-dur. Even water sleeps, but the enemy never rests.
My wrist is killing me. I have been trying to recreate the Annals from memory, wracking my mind and cramping my hand.
Hopeless. A thousand years of history, over 150 separate Annalists, and I had had only a few days to study them up close. Yes, I've marched with the Company for almost twenty years- I am familiar with the major epics of our forerunners. But, god damn it! Can you write down with perfect word accuracy every bloody history tome you've ever seen?
I've been putting my head together with Sapper. We would have included Bullet as well, but he's busy being the new Lieutenant; the Lieutenant being the new Captain. Not that any of us can bear to call them by their new rank.
But me and Sapper, well, we've been around the longest. We've heard the stories of the Pastel wars, the Battle at Charm, the Matayangan Invasion, and so on. But it is even worse with two memories than with one. For instance, in the Book of Croaker, the Annalist describes the Black Company's service in Beryl, which had directly led to our service with the Lady. I distinctly remember him starting off that volume talking about the various ill omens in the city- Sapper is equally sure it starts with a description of a Company squad clearing out a tavern of rebels. I am positive that the hellish siege at Dejagore occurred during the fight against the Protector- Sapper guarantees that it happened in the Shadowmaster campaign.
And, obviously, we can hardly look it up and see who's right.
He can remember a great deal I can't; I can recall things he doesn't. But when we both remember two different stories... And there are vast tracts of Company history where neither one of us can recall a damn thing.
It's useless, anyway. The men are rocky, scared. Merely replacing the Annals won't be enough for them, they need the originals. Because the originals were actually there, at Juniper or Nochram or Hollegrad; or at least were recopied and translated from the originals. They're not simply bits of parchment with information written on them; they are history; they're us. The remnants of the Black Company can't be placated by any sloppy, incomplete travesty of its heritage.
I'm having trouble sleeping at night: sometimes I think I can actually hear the screams of terror and anguish of our fallen forefathers, for the Book of the Slain was lost as well. It was the only immortality that they ever got, and it was taken on my watch.
I hope there is no afterlife. If there is, I fear I will be confronted by my predecessors, and I will merit whatever they do to me.
The Lieutenant, Bullet, Sapper, Saintly, Salim, and me have found a quiet place to discuss our predicament. We are meeting in an barrack room originally intended for a company of Easterlings that got wiped out on the Pelennor Fields. The location is good- no snooping uruks; only one entrance in or out; just one small window too cramped to crawl through. Sapper's already checked for magical surveillance. Arrowhead and Bop are guarding the door, and they're both in an uruk-killing mood.
We are as sure as we can be that not a word of this discussion will be heard in Barad-dur.
"The most direct route," the Lieutenant is saying, "is to locate the Annals and launch a raid to recapture them."
"I doubt that the Dark Lord will be so stupid as to allow us to discover the location," Bullet retorts. "The son of a bitch has us over a barrel, and he likes it that way. If we want to find them, we'll need to spend a lot of time and effort, which is going to be way too obvious."
"After which, shing!" Saintly mimes chopping his head off. All of us turn and glare at him. He shrugs. Sapper starts to call up his famous hotfoot spell until the Lieutenant shushes him.
"We need different plans," the Lieutenant says. "Brainstorm, just put ideas on the table. We don't care if it sounds stupid, just fling out whatever's on your mind."
"There is another idea..." Salim begins. He hesitates. He knows that he's the newcomer to the old hand's table- the quiet, respectful Salim gets to replace our slain Croc. He's still unused to command and responsibility, and he's not sure if he's supposed to be proactive here or what. Salim's only been with us for about five years, less than some, but he's intelligent, meticulous, and is held in high esteem by every man in the Company. And if he tends to go into a cold, calculated berserker rage in the middle of battle, well, we'll just have to live with that.
We all encourage him to spill it.
"Well, I was thinking," he begins. "There probably isn't much we can think of that the Eye hasn't considered. He must have known he was playing with fire when he choose to fuck us, yes? So I say, we wait him out. Once the hosts of Mordor pour back across Ithilien and destroy Gondor, he won't need us as much. I don't think he'll ever relinquish us now that we're under his thumb, but if we can lull him into a false sense of security... we spring our raid and run north in the aftermath of Gondor's fall. That's my plan- bide our time, and strike like lightning once the Eye starts to forget that we're dangerous."
Saintly starts to say something about sitting around on our asses, but the Lieutenant shuts him up. "This is brainstorming, save the criticism for later," he is told.
"Any other ideas?" the Lieutenant asks.
Damn it, this isn't right, and we can all feel it. The Captain used to tell us what the plan was. Lieutenant, I know you're new at this, but we need you to grow into you role as quickly as possible.
"I have one," I say. "Minas Morgul is the center of a nation-wide spiderweb of communications. We have gold aplenty, and a steady parade of low-life uruks passing through, right? Spread the word. Anyone who gives us the location gets thrice his weight in war-booty. There's bound to be at least a few uruks out there who are dumb enough to cross their Master for a pile of cash, and all it takes is one guy who overheard about where the luftig-hai burzum's history wound up."
Several other plans were advanced and duly recorded. They weren't particularly realistic or helpful, so I won't bother to write them down.
The whole conversation took a more... interesting turn when Sapper stood up from his seat and made his pitch. Silence descended across the circle. Say what you will about the little spook, Sapper has real stage presence.
"You're all thinking way too small," he says. He's grinning wide, like a frog who got lucky last night. "How do we escape. How do we find our Annals. How do we sneak around with sufficient slyness to survive. Well, I say, we don't. I say," he continued, leering, "that we play for the biggest stakes imaginable."
"I'm not sure I'm going to like this," Bullet mutters.
"Dispose of the Dark Lord. Seize control of his armies. Rule Mordor."
Cricket. Cricket.
The Lieutenant chews his lip awhile before responding. "Sapper, you've gone off the deep end, haven't you."
"No, seriously, hear me out. The Eye is deeply, deeply unpopular. His defeat at the Pelennor Fields has destabilized his control. We can take advantage of it. We can overthrow him. If he didn't have a demi-god's power, his subjects would probably tear him to shreds with no prompting from us at all."
"A demi-god's power," I say. "Surely, you see the flaw in your pitch."
"Listen, damn it. My point is that without that power, the Eye will not be obeyed by anyone. His reign collapses the second he does."
Sapper looks around triumphantly, like he's made some kind of telling point. We do not respond, save for Salim who raises a single eyebrow.
"Don't you get it? If we can find the Dark Lord's weakness, we can strike at the heart of our problem. You see, our dilemma is not that we can't find the Annals, that the Annals are too well-guarded, that we are under surveillance. Those are symptoms. Our dilemma is that we are on the wrong side of an insane psychopath at the head of a rising nation. And until we remove that obstacle, we will fail in everything we do."
"It's insane," Bullet growls. "We can't pull that off. We're not fucking djinni, Sapper."
"We can't pull any of these plans off," Saintly says. Like Sapper, he's smiling ferociously. "Like Salim said, the Eye has probably anticipated our every move. We might as well pick a plan that's too audacious to be foreseen."
Sapper, Saintly, and Salim are for it, because they are clearly crazy. The Lieutenant, Bullet, and I are against. We prefer Salim's original plan of picking our moment, but they insist that if we wait until all external enemies of Mordor are eliminated, then our problems will expand, since the Red Eye will be the undisputed master of about half of the continent. We admit this is the case, but active sedition could obliterate us instantly.
We go over the same ground, run the same arguments, and make the same rebuttals well into the night.
May God above help us, because we are going with Sapper's plan. The Lieutenant has decided that if we're going to try to shrug off the yoke of Mordor, then we might as well strike at the root of it. And if it works, it will make one hell of an addition to the Annals.
I'm still against it. Saintly says that's because I'm an old man with no fire in my belly. I can only respond by saying that all of the reckless and headstrong men I knew in my youth are cold in the ground, while I'm still around.
So. Staging a military coup in a totalitarian state run by a mad-dog sorceror. Harder than it sounds, and it sounds impossible. Where the fuck do we begin?
Bullet suggests that we should first secure Minas Morgul, since it's no good inciting rebellion in far off lands if the guy next door rats you out.
That seems as reasonable a place to start as any. Saintly and Sapper handpick a crew of cut-throats and get to work weeding out anyone that seems unusually loyal to the Eye or without enough spine to back our military coup, while the Lieutenant starts an underground recruitment drive for possible allies. Bullet and Salim, meanwhile, start spreading the gold around the incoming and outgoing regiments, trying to ascertain our Annals' location.
I'll update here as they progress. I suspect that this notebook will be added to the Annals when we retrieve them.
When. I didn't even think before I wrote that. Perhaps I'm more optimistic about this business than I thought.
Slazari is with us. One quick 15 minute chat with the Lieutenant, and he'll support any move we wish to make. Most uruks are cowardly and mean, but our boy Slaz has guts, has brains, and is seriously pissed at how the Eye handled the Pelennor Fields. Moreover, he knew that no uruk would have gotten out of there alive if it weren't for the Captain, and he almost couldn't believe his squinty little eyes when he saw how the Eye purged us after.
To the foolish, random killings are the sign of a strong and terrifying lord. To people like Slazari, all they indicate is that the lord is scared and weak.
And to people like Slazari, when the guy in charge is weak, it's time to chop some heads. The social habits of the uruks are working in our favor.
With Slazari working with us, we suborn more uruk warchiefs. You see, if the Lieutenant were to sidle up to a fellow captain of Mordor and says, "I say, isn't this a wonderful day to betray our Lord and Master?", the uruk would turn him in without a second thought. But when a well-respected warrior like Slaz is clearly shown to back us up, well, the dynamic changes. Now, it's not a lone nutcase spouting dangerous and foolish talk. Now, there's an organization in place. We can almost see the gears in their sordid brains turning- if this coup goes successfully, and I'm not in on it, what happens to me? If I try to turn them in, how do I know my superiors aren't in on it? Betraying ol' Slaz and the luftig-hai burzum could be my death sentence. Better by far to give my support now and wait and see what happens.
Obviously, their support isn't worth anything if we're caught- they'll drop us the moment we appear weak. But we've set the motion in progress, and pretty soon that well-spring of resentment and bitterness that runs so deep in Mordor will start to snowball into a genuine revolution. In the few days since the luftig-hai conspiracy was first implemented, we've turned almost half of the warchiefs stationed in Minas Morgul.
And on the other end of the spectrum, there have been a lot of fights recently between Company men and the uruks. The official explanation is that the uruks go up to groups of armed men that outnumber them four or five to one, without bothering to arm or armor themselves, and start pointless fights. The men, we claim, were drinking. Things got out of hand. What? Our boys had no wine anywhere nearby when the fights start? Well, they were drinking before they saw the uruks. Huh? The men weren't staggering, or puking, or doing anything to indicate intoxication? Well, pal, Bullet teaches our men good balance in their daily training. Curiously enough, almost all of the troublemakers come from uruk companies we haven't corrupted yet. And even more curiously, after those fights end, the companies that they belong to develop a proper revolutionary fervor.
Anyone who tries to run away and tell someone outside of Minas Morgul about what's happening here gets labeled a deserter, and is promptly executed. Soon, the masses will go with us simply because it'll be easier than not going with us.
You'd think that all these fights and desertions would be reported to Barad-dur. You'd think that it would look suspicious, like the Company is conducting little purges of their own. That someone upstairs would notice something.
You'd think that, but Shatarz, the head uruk who reports directly to Barad-dur, is one of us. This makes culling the loyal and intimidating the fence-sitters astoundingly easy. In fact, the folks at Barad-dur sent a terse letter of approval to Shatarz, congratulating him for taking a firm stand against cowardly deserters and troublemakers.
Bwa ha ha.
The Tower of Minas Morgul is a hotbed of treason, though nobody on the outside seems to know it. It looks exactly the same as it did when we arrived, but you'd better believe that the undercurrents are shifting away from the Red Eye and towards the Black Company.
We have no such luck in finding the Annals. Not all the gold in our treasury can loosen anyone's tongues. Either nobody in any regiment knows where they are, or no one is stupid enough to risk the Eye's wrath in telling us.
The conspiracy is deepening. We've turned everyone in a position of authority, and now the revolutionary rot is creeping down into the ranks. We keep hammering at their natural resistance to rebel against the Eye, reminding them about their use as battle fodder and the low regard in which they're held. We tell them, follow us. We're your friends, we're your natural allies. To those bastards upstairs, we're all expendables, pawns. Why should we allow this to stand? Better by far to fight for the right to decide our own fates than to be sacrificed for nothing on a General's fancy. The sooner the Eye falls, the sooner we can all live free.
Also, the sooner you commit to us, the bigger your cut of the spoils will be.
It is with a mix of pride and guilt that I report the Slazari and his brothers Gulbrog and Gothga are the three newest brothers in the Company; for the moment, they alone are deemed trustworthy enough to not betray us. The pride is because for the first time since I've replaced Haroun, I feel like a proper Annalist. Guilt, because I'm supposed to have all newcomers swear on the Annals...
It's amazing how disaster changes us. Had any of the yellow freaks tried to join before Pelennor Fields ripped us apart, we'd have turned them down flat. Now, we all rejoice to see new blood in our veins. Slaz, Grog, and Goth (as they are now known) are welcomed like heroes, especially after Bullet tells carefully crafted tales about how they stood firm by our side while the hosts of Mordor fled. They receive offers of bottles of wine and moonshine from the boys; they're invited to the tonk games and are mercilessly cheated until they figure out how to play properly; they're included in the bitch sessions that develop whenever the men aren't working on anything in particular.
The Lieutenant and I agree that they'll fit in just fine.
Life is complicated. I've known this for decades. The moment you think the sailing is smooth, a maelstrom will up and wreck your ship and send you to your watery grave. Or so I assume. I've never been out to sea. Maybe sailors' lives have no twists to them. I'm sorry, I'm rambling. Let me just say it flat out.
Zim cut Shaggy real bad in an attempt to escape. He was on guard duty and she stuck him in the armpit, where he was unarmored, with one of Pork Chop's scalpels. Then she tried to make a run for it. She missed the major veins, but he's in bad shape through blood loss and shock. Apparently, the only reason she stuck around to start with is because she thought she owed Haroun, but once he died she figured she had no ties here. She hasn't said a word since our uruk allies on guard duty brought her back to us, so I don't know her exact motives. But I doubt she had intended to slice anyone up on her way out.
God only knows how she figured to escape from this fortress, cross Ithilien alone and on foot, and reach her haven in Osgiliath. I guess if you put enough pressure on someone for long enough, they stop making good decisions. I can't imagine what it must have been like for her, delivered into the hands of her country's enemies, alone and friendless save for a band of cutthroats like us. I can't blame her for trying to desert us. I suspect that I would do the same, were I in her position.
Nonetheless, it hurts. We're a brotherhood. For the most part, no one deserts. When they do, it's a slap in the face to all of us. But then, all of us made our choice when we joined up; Zim didn't. She was a conscript, practically. A lot of us in the Black Company were conscripts in other armies before we found our home here.
I don't know what the Lieutenant is going to do about this. The punishment for murdering or attempting to murder a brother is death, but I doubt it will come to that- there are extenuating circumstances galore. So what the hell are we going to do with her?
Perhaps if we had a proper Annalist, someone who could have inspired Zim and shown her the history and heritage that she's now a part of, then maybe she wouldn't have tried to escape and slice up Shaggy. If I thought anybody in this ragtag Company could do better than me...
She's been respectfully imprisoned in the same barrack where we decided to stage our coup against the Eye. As before, Arrowhead and Bop are guarding the only door. They keep their faces studiously blank as I enter.
"Has she said anything yet?"
They shake their heads solemnly.
"Alright."
She's not looking good. Her hair is bedraggled and has small clots of blood embedded in it. Souvenirs from her time with Pork Chop? Or is it from Shaggy? She is sitting very still in a bunk, head hanging, hands clasped tightly together on her lap. It's clear that she's been crying.
"Ho, Zim."
She looks up. She slips on a ghost of a smile, tinged with sadness and anxiety.
"The Lieutenant sent me down here. We sort of need to figure out what to do with you."
"I understand."
"Well, I don't think so. You see, Haroun kind of made a mess of things when he recruited you. The rules of enlistment are quite clear on the subject. There is to be no coercion of any kind during the process. By placing you in a situation where you were forced to choose between death and the Company, he trampled all over our sacred rites. And those rites are there for a reason- they help prevent people trying to desert us."
"Don't blame Haroun for that, Papa. You should know it wasn't his fault. He's not the one who put me between a rock and a hard place. In fact, he's the one who pulled me out of it."
"I know. But nonetheless, boundaries have been broken, procedures abandoned. Up till now we've ignored the situation, since you seemed to be fitting in alright. But now, we need to settle it. We can't have you cutting up brothers trying to get back home. And it's making us all very uneasy to keep a member of the Company under armed guard. We need a solution, Zim. We need to find a way to redeem you and bring you back into the fold."
"Alternatively, you can kick me out and return me to Gondor."
I sucked spittle between my front teeth in that certain way that means, Well, you see...
"Well, you see, Zim, that's not exactly possible under the present circumstances. For obvious reasons."
"Yes," she said bitterly. "You must, of course, obey Sauron in all things."
"Who?"
"Sauron."
"Who?"
"Your master. The Dark Lord of Barad-dur."
"God damn, that's his name? We've always just known him as the Eye. What's it translate to? I'm not familiar with your northern tongues yet."
"It means, 'the Putrid'."
I smirk. "I think I understand why he doesn't want that particular name bandied about," I tell her. Then I do a double take. "Wait, what do you mean, 'we have to obey him'?"
She eyes me strangely. "Haroun told me that the Black Company backs the highest bidder. Sauron is the highest bidder. Hence, you have to follow his commands. Hence, you cannot return me to my homeland. Did I stutter or something?"
I eye her strangely right back. "Has no one told you, Zim?"
"Told me what?"
"The rape of the Annals. The Captain's murder. The grand conspiracy. Ringing any bells?"
She knew about the Annals and the Captain's death, but somehow she had been left completely out of the loop on the military coup. No one had bothered to tell her that Gondor was our secret though uninformed ally. No one had mentioned that our express goal was to chop the bogeyman of her homeland into fishbait.
She had simply put in her time in the hospital with Pork Chop, steadily suffocating from being surrounded by southerners and uruks and other traditionally hostile types. Then, one night, the pressure snapped her and she pulled a blade on poor old Shaggy.
Well, she's in on it now. Once we get a chance to contact Minas Tirith, she'll be a valuable asset, and until then she can stitch up Company men who got into "drunken" fights with loyal uruks.
We're still unsure about whether she is a Company brother or not. And yes, I know that she's a female, but she's still referred to as a brother- it's tradition. But whether she is one of us or is not, her goals and ours are aligned now. We'll work out the details of her irregular enlistment once we find out if we survive with the Annals intact.
I report Zim's newfound zeal to the Lieutenant. He simply grunts acknowledgment and carries on with what he is doing. I think he's getting the hang of being Captain now- he doesn't freely express his thoughts to his subordinates anymore, and and he's starting to cultivate the image of a dashing warlord in complete control of everything around him. He has the right face for command- handsome, cruel, and composed. Now his attitude is catching up with necessity.
Things are, in general, looking up.
Trouble. One of the Nazgul is coming to review the troops. We received word from the Tower.
Damned if I know how we'll play this. All it will take is a single soldier breathing a word of the conspiracy to have us slaughtered wholesale, and the Annals burned.
If this my last entry, I just want to say that all I ever wanted in this august Company is to serve to the best of my ability and not fuck up too badly.
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